Johnny Socko

FWIW, I don’t think Google specifically needs to be in that space. You can now buy very nice, premium Chromebooks from HP, Samsung, Asus, etc. Google is a whole separate dysfunctional topic, lol. I just get irritated by people grousing about expensive Chromebooks.

I don’t know why people get offended by the idea of an expensive Chromebook. Like maybe some consumers just want good hardware regardless of operating system? Furthermore, Chrome OS devices have a long update cycle, so if you’re going to have a device for 7 years, it might as well be a good one.

Two quotes from the linked thread:

Google doubled down on RCS and created "Jibe Cloud Platform," which uses GSMA’s RCS Universal Profile to help carriers launch RCS quickly and scale easily. Jibe Cloud Platform is NOT mandatory to use to get RCS. RCS Universal Profile is the key.

.

GSMA owns the RCS Universal Profile, and it’s supported by 47 mobile network operators (including ALL U.S. carriers), 11 manufacturers (including Samsung), and 2 OS providers (Google & Microsoft)

¯\(ツ)/¯

My kid is an 8th grade student of LAUSD Virtual Academy (online learning). Here is a timeline of our experience:

• Monday: School holiday
• Tuesday AM: No access to school systems. The hack had taken place over the weekend and was reported in the press at that time, but we were out of town and had no idea that something was going on. Despite the hack having gone on for at least 48 hours, there was NO direct communication from the District to parents regarding the outage until after 9AM Tuesday — meaning up to an hour after school started. Astounding.
• Tuesday PM: District instructs all 500,000 stakeholders (students, parents, staff) to obtain a temporary password by calling the IT department on the phone. Obviously, most people (like me) could not get through.
• Wednesday: No communication from the District in the AM, but in the early afternoon they sent out an email containing a link to a web form to request a temporary password for your account, which I submitted immediately. In the evening I received a text stating "Your temporary password has been created. Click on this link to retrieve." The link resulted in an "Unable to load page" result in all browsers. Called the support line and received the "It’s after business hours" message.
• Thursday AM: Called the support line again, waited on hold for 45 minutes. Was transferred to a Tier II tech, and requested the temporary password. He said, "I could help you with that, but our system is offline for maintenance until the afternoon."
• Thursday PM: Called the support line again, and was on hold for an hour and a half before having to hang up due to leaving work. (It’s possible their system never came back online during business hours.)
• Friday — right now as I’m typing this: On hold with the support line for 30 minutes and counting. Will probably need to hang up before getting help, due to a work meeting later this morning.

Anyone can be a victim of a hack. I do not blame the District for that. But I do blame them for the horrific response. They immediately put the onus on their users to chase down a solution to the problem. What they should have done is declare a student holiday until they can get their shit together.

It’s "Make sure YOU do this to make things right". Not "WE will make things right, and then let everyone know when access is 100% restored". By shifting the burden,
LAUSD thinks they can shift responsibility for the inevitable slipped grades onto the students.

Google’s implementation is an over-the-top instant messaging service using the name "RCS"

This is completely false, and I expected better from you. RCS is a standard promulgated by the GSM Association. The standard is extensible, and end-to-end encryption is an extension that Google added to its Jibe implementation. This thread breaks it down pretty well.

As of now, all major US carriers support RCS. But they took their time in doing so, which is why Google developed their implementation a few years ago. But everyone crowing about the carriers in here is wrong, the carriers DO support RCS.

Hahahaha!

[Edit: To clarify, I’m laughing at you, not with you.]

Maybe, but it’s sure not more trustworthy than SMS!

But they will fall back to unencrypted SMS/MMS despite the "threats to [your] privacy?" Stop trying to insult our intelligence with this nonsense, and just admit that profit is the one and only reason for Apple to defer RCS, as admitted to by Mr. Cook himself.